A Typological Study Of Cardinals And Ordinals

This thesis discusses word order concerning cardinals and ordinals and its relevant problems. Through typology and the theory of implicational universals and by combining description and statistics, this author does the research into the grammatical features of the cardinals and ordinals and their relevance embodied in word order, trying to explain them in a functional way.After researching into the word order of numerals in the 112 ethnic languages taken as samples in this thesis, this author draws the following two implicational universals: In NPs of a language, (1) if ordinals are preposed before nouns then so are cardinals; (2) If numeral "one" is preposed before nouns or classifiers, so are the other numerals. These two implicational universals can be drawn from the two principles: "The bigger the numerals are, the more they tend to be nouns; the smaller they are, the more they tend to be adjectives" and "Ordinals tend to be adjective more often than cardinals".